Many enterprises have important data that should be backed up for business reasons and/or compliance reasons. For example, there are compliance guidelines under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to preserve records of complaint for 6 years, to preserve certain billing records for 6 years, to retain medical records for 5 years, and so forth. To back up and protect such data, enterprises typically deploy enterprise data protection systems. These systems periodically generate backup copies of specified data, and write the backup copies to backup storage devices.
Data protection systems are typically set up and maintained by information technology (IT) administrators (often called backup administrators). Such IT administrators do not typically have detailed knowledge about the systems for which they are to backup data. Accordingly, it can be difficult and time consuming for an IT administrator to set up protection policies to backup data for enterprise systems. Often, the IT administrator will need to coordinate with a system administrator who manages the system that is to be backed up to determine what data from the system to protect. This can further consume enterprise resources and slow down the process of setting up protection policies. Moreover, this can result in backup policies that do not protect sensitive data. Additionally, enterprise systems are dynamic in nature. Therefore, even if an IT administrator sets up a data protection policy correctly, that data protection policy may stop protecting important data in the future unless the IT administrator correctly modifies the policy.